A map of about every primary passenger railway in the USA for 2016, commuter rail included.
Surely there are more trains lines about than this ?!
Nope. We’re animals. I’ve only trailed by train twice in the U.S., and it was the same line, once DC to Philadelphia, and once DC to NYC for work once I discovered the train was two hours faster than flying and cabbing back into NYC.
I do forget though that you guys fly everywhere and trains might not be practical. I live on an island the size of one of your states !
Fun fact: the busiest railway station in America (Penn Station in New York City) gets fewer passengers than Liverpool Central.
I knew the US had a much less extensive rail infrastructure than us, but bloody hell, the fact that there are ENTIRE STATES that literally don’t have passenger rail is madness.
I’d still love to travel on it some time, mind.
Just imagine the jobs you could create by building a decent railway system!
Behold, the end result of graft and political corruption.
I had no idea most of the US had no regional lines? Like, I live in tiny little MA with one of those clusters of red. Does everybody else have to DRIVE???
yes. we drive. and it’s terrible.
D: This is actually distressing.
to be fair some cities do have good bus systems
but….yeah.
what the shuddering fuck? That’s IT?!
actually we used to have a lot more, but as far as i’m aware i’m pretty sure the car companies bought a lot of railways and then destroyed them to force people to buy cars
Also some of those states that don’t have rails also have more cows than people.
Also our trains are slow and it’s usually much faster to drive than to take a train. We don’t have those speed rail things.
When you suddenly understand Sheldon’s train enthusiasm
And then there’s Europe:
And because that looks a tiny bit cluttered (and because we’re a German blog), here’s a railway map of Germany:
In red are the high speed InterCityExpress lines, blue are the InterCity lines and the grey ones are smaller regional lines.
And for Americans who don’t know how large Germany is: It is half the size of Texas.
Consider that this map does not show local lines, for example: This is Hamburg
This is Berlin
This is Cologne
External image
And this is Munich
(Aesthetic.)
this is Dresden (bus&tram)
and we have “only”
525.105 inhabitants
Train systems are really great, and it’s a damn shame so many rails were destroyed as a result of capitalism…
I actually was gonna take the train to work when I first started but it turns out it takes like 2 hours to get to where I live to work, and it’s basically the same length of using the freeway, freeway I get there max hour and a half, but at like 5am I get to work at 5:30ish and clock in, train don’t get up that early… If trains were 24 hours and people didn’t steal bikes left and right I might have opted to use the train… But yeah like someone said we have no express/bullet trains and the train makes so many god damn stops…
Where I live I can still see a lot of the old rails that were abandoned/dismantled. A lot of the rail beds are still there.
trains are still used for one thing in north america: industry. in nebraska I used to see oil, coal, and cargo trains all the time, and even here in vancouver island oil trains are a common sight through nanaimo. trains are totally normal for industry, but not for passengers.
30, She/her. Used to be DreamingPagan a long time back. Multi-fandom, mostly Black Sails these days but with a lot of Tolkien and funny things interspersed. Complete language and history nerd - be warned. I write fic and occasionally I talk about ships.
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